Amityville: The Awakening (2017)

Amityville: The Awakening earns its keep by taking a familiar haunted-house legend and giving it a slick, modern jolt—less dusty lore, more immediate, teen-on-the-edge-of-adulthood unease. It’s at its best when it lets the family’s financial strain and fragile hope hang in the air, so the scares feel like they’re pressing on real nerves instead of just rattling doors. The movie delivers a steady run of entertaining set pieces and a few clever pivots that make it feel like a fresher, more confident entry than many Amityville offshoots. If you want slow-burn, arthouse dread, this may feel too direct, but if you’re in the mood for a decent, crowd-pleasing horror ride with a unique angle on a notorious address, it’s an easy yes.

Amityville: The Awakening is clearly trying to reboot the famous haunted-house myth with a modern family-in-crisis hook and a “miracle recovery” twist to raise the stakes. The problem is it plays like a checklist of familiar horror beats—telegraphed jump scares, stock creepy-house imagery, and characters who rarely feel deep enough to make the danger land. The pacing drifts, and when it finally pushes into bigger reveals, it still struggles to feel fresh or genuinely unsettling. If you just want a low-effort, late-night paranormal movie with a few serviceable spooky moments and don’t mind predictability, it’s passable; if you’re craving originality or real tension, you’ll likely be bored.